In 2014 Cheerful Ghost published it's first game Starship Rubicon, an asteroids-esque rogue lite. Working with Wick to take his game to a wider audience was a really fun experience and along the way we hit some fun milestones like releasing the game on Windows, Mac and Linux on Steam. Because of that Cheerful Ghost was asked to attend this years Steam Developer Days and we happily signed up. I wasn't sure what to expect but I figured we'd learn more about what Valve was up to and maybe play some fun games along the way.

It's All About VR Baby!

It might not be too surprising that Valve is focusing heavily on VR and the Vive. The main social area here at Steam Developer Days is lined with VR booths featuring a ton of really interesting games such as Work Simulator and Tilt Brush. I've really enjoyed trying my hand at Work Simulator and after the whole experience really think that the Vive is the most immersive VR I've used to date. The sensitivity of the tracking and controllers is superb and much smoother than other VR I've tried like the Oculus. Wick discovered the Tilt Brush VR app by Google and was painting some really interesting things for about an hour. It's hard to describe just want you can do with Tilt Brush but imagine a paint program where you can paint with light, smoke and other effects in 3D at room scale. These kinds of VR art experiences are going to allow people to create some really great stuff and I can't wait to see what people do with it when VR becomes more popular.

Valve Dropped Some News On What's Next

We've heard rumblings of a new Steam client update that aims to change things up considerably and I heard first hand of this today talking to a Steam designer and it was later confirmed in a Steam talk. They didn't talk a ton about what the new version would do but they did note that they wanted to improve how people find new games.

Valve said that they are partnering with Samsung to have the Steam Link built in to upcoming Samsung TV's. Smart TV's are doing so much these days and integrating the Steam Link into them seems like a really great next step to get Steam into every living room. I wonder how long it will be before you don't need a PC to stream the games and the TV's have enough horsepower to do it themselves?

During the VR talk they also let us know that they are working on bringing VR to Mac and SteamOS and that there would be a demo of VR on Linux for us to get our hands on tomorrow. Valve bringing VR to SteamOS, Linux and Mac sounds like something that should make people happy as will push VR to be a more open system, something Valve is committed to.

The Swag Is Strong With This One

Each Steam Developer Day attendee was gifted a Steam Controller, Steam Link and a bunch of other swag. This is a really great bonus and something I am looking forward to checking out. It's also really nice for players of Steam games because now that more developers have a Steam Controller, adding support is that much easier.

There Is No Steamboy

Personally, I've been interested in Valve producing a handheld system for quite some time. While I was talking to a Valve Developer I asked them if Valve was working on such a system and they said they weren't. They remembered the Steamboy concept video and thought it was pretty interesting but said Valve wasn't working on anything like that. It makes sense as they are focused on other things right now but I thought it was worth mentioning and lamenting.

Interested in reading my thoughts on day 2? Hit the link below.

http://cheerfulghost.com/jdodson/posts/3132/steam-developer-days-day-ii-a-wrap-up-to-a-great-conference

Ubisoft and EA are giving away two classic games you might want to check out. Continuing with it's 30 year anniversary celebration, Ubisoft is handing out copies of Beyond Good and Evil on UPlay. EA just dropped a Peter Molyneux classic Dungeon Keeper on its Origin service for free too. If you were looking for some classic PC titles to play these might be worth checking out.

Unless you are too good for free and absolutely must pay for them and I imagine you could do that if you wanted.

Head over to Club Ubisoft to get Beyond Good and Evil:

https://club.ubisoft.com/en-US/ubi30

Dungeon Keeper on EA Origin:

https://www.origin.com/usa/en-us/store/free-games/on-the-house

Dreams of finally owning the self lacing shoes from Back to the Future 2 might finally be here and coming along side a very good cause.

"Almost 30 years ago, Nike inspired a future vision of footwear — an individually responsive shoe that senses the wearer and adapts on its own. The Nike Mag, famously worn on the silver screen by Michael J. Fox, quickly became a cultural icon.

Today, Nike and The Michael J. Fox Foundation proudly announce the release of the 2016 Nike Mag — a limited-edition release of only 89 pairs available globally through an online draw — to once again channel the excitement of the Nike Mag to raise awareness in the fight against Parkinson’s disease and the Foundation's tireless efforts to speed a cure."

If you are interested in entering in the raffle, check the link below. It would be incredible if you won and hopefully, someday, Nike releases these as an actual think. Because if they did, i'd totally buy them.

http://news.nike.com/news/how-to-get-the-2016-nike-mag

I really enjoyed watching Star Wars The Force Awakens in theaters. I still enjoy watching it now and think it's a very solid addition to the Star Wars universe. With that, as I was watching it, I noticed a few things that stood out to me that I may have chosen to do differently. Some of those things are covered in Red Letter Media's Plinkett review of Star Wars The Force Awakens. The main one for me is how similar it is to a New Hope. It's nice that it "feels like Star Wars" but maybe i'd have made it less similar? I love talking about this stuff and Plinkett's Force Awakens Review opens the discussion again, which is something I can't get enough of.

The Force Awakens review starts things off by covering all the time that has passed since the Revenge of the Sith Plinkett Review and all the think pieces that have attempted to put the Prequels in a positive light. It's an interesting discussion about stupid click bait articles and reviews as well as the Star Wars Ring Theory that is an interesting idea but when put up to a microscope seems a bit silly.

The Plinkett Force Awakens Review is interesting because it also contains a few notes from the past Prequel reviews. I like this because it sort of gets everyone up to speed even if you haven't watched all the previous reviews. That said, if you haven't and like the style of this review, I seriously recommend you watch them all. I'd even start with the first ever Plinkett review of Star Wars Generations because they all blend together and form a fun story that is loosely threaded together.

Plinkett forges ahead discussing Disney's acquisition of LucasFilm and George Lucas's departure from Star Wars. Originally when LucasFilm was purchased Disney said Lucas would be involved in Star Wars something that was quickly changed and Plinkett notes.

My favorite parts of the review are when Plinkett discusses his ideas for an alternate Force Awakens storyline and each Plinkett review contains live action scenes involving George Lucas and this time JJ Abrams joins. Overall the review seems to note that The Force Awakens is a good movie but suffers from a few issues to repeated viewings. Not sure I disagree with much of what he says here but again... I really like the movie and still do.

Ultimately Star Wars The Force Awakens had an impossible job of creating a modern version Star Wars to lifelong fans as well as kids. It had a very fine dance to do in that the prequels were a thing that many longtime fans didn't love but a new generation of kids did. It had to start up a whole new universe of films as well as be a fucking great film and for that, I think it was one of the most impressive movies made in quite some time. It's not the best movie I saw in 2015 but it's one of the most anticipated and more than met my expectations considering how much was riding on it and how many peoples expectations it had to meet.

I love nearly everything Red Letter Media does and loved watching The Force Awakens Review. As someone that comes back to watch the prequel reviews multiple times i'm happy we got this review and if you watch it let me know what you think of it.

Mick Gordon the composer of the new Doom Soundtrack has dropped the whole score in it's entirely on YouTube and you can stream the whole thing above. At over two hours this intense hash metal soundtrack is worth checking out if you were a fan of the game or crazy metal scores.

From the first mention of the NES Classic I was in. 30 amazing NES games in HD that hook up to your modern TV? Hell yes. Nintendo is known for producing good quality stuff but we didn't know how it would look in person or what the user interface would be... until now. Nintendo has launched a new commercial with a song that sounds like Don't You Want Me by The Human League which basically means it's pitch perfect for the NES classic. The TV spot shows off how easy it is to create save points by pressing the reset button. The NES classic interface is a 8-bit themed homage to that era and it looks very easy to use. When you move through each game there is a 1P or 2P icon on each game signifying if you can play it with a friend or not, which is a great way to sell that second controller that isn't included. The commercial also shows off the 4x3 mode in crisp HD and CRT filter mode which looks good for what it does.

The NES Classic drops November 11th and is already sold out on Amazon but if you ask them they will alert you when you can pre-order it again. Curious how many of you plan on picking this up and if you weren't does this convince you?

After Amazon bought Twitch I was wondering what that had in store for Twitch as when a company is bought out it usually has a big effect on the child company. Today Amazon is launching Twitch Prime which is an extension of the Amazon Prime yearly service. Basically if you have Amazon Prime you get Twitch Prime included as part of the package, which is a nice bonus for Amazon Prime members. Twitch Prime gives you an exclusive ad free experience and every so often you get free games and exclusive in game items. For the launch of Twitch Prime you can get the free Hearthstone hero Tyrande Whisperwind free until November 5th. If you have Amazon Prime but don't care about the Hearthstone Hero, I urge you to head over to link your Twitch and Prime account to get the code and give it away. Apparently this deal is region locked to the counties Amazon Prime is available in so not all Hearthstone players are eligible to get the hero.

That said, if you are you should check it out as I've played a couple matches with Tyrande and she is a fun new hero that makes losing as Priest a bit easier to handle. All joking aside, I made a pretty fun Resurrect & N'Zoth Priest deck and Tyrande pilots it well.

http://us.battle.net/hearthstone/en/blog/20303032/try-twitch-prime-and-get-tyrande-whisperwind-9-30-2016

For quite some time Hearthstone players have noted that some cards are a bit overpowered. Chief among the cards most cited as massively overpowered are Yogg Saron, Tuskar Totemic and Call of the Wild. Blizzard seems to have agreed because today they dropped information about some upcoming balancing changes to the cards I cited. I never felt that Yogg or Call of the Wild were overpowered but I don't really mind the changes made to both cards. In the case of Call of the Wild Blizzard increased the mana cost to 9 still making it a very powerful late game card but it now competes with other Hunter cards like King Krush. One change I really liked is the nerf to Abusive Sergeant. Abusive Sergeant is now a 1/1 down from a 2/1 which makes it a more situational card as opposed to a card that was nearly always good at any point in a Zoo deck. The changes to Charge seem to have entirely wiped out the Warrior OTK Worgen deck which I won't lament as when the combo was achieved there was nothing you could do to stop it.

Happy Blizzard made these changes and now that One Night in Karazhan is safely behind us I can't wait to learn more about the next expansion, whenever that will be.

http://us.battle.net/hearthstone/en/blog/20303031

YouTuber Pannenkeok2012 has made one of the more interesting videos i've seen in quite some time that covers everything there is to know about character's blinking in Mario 64. Apparently not all character's in Mario 64 blink but the ones that do are somewhat diverse. For instance Goomba's have two eye states with eyes open and closed yet Mario has 3 eye states of eyes open, eyes partially closed and eyes fully closed.

You can also check out more Pannenkeok2012 videos that focus on other interesting things related to Mario 64 like in game pause buffering and what happens when you talk to Yoshi with negative lives.

Douglas Welcome and I are friends from way back in the 90’s(if you can image that far back). Our friendship shared a mutual affinity for music and various geekery so when I saw a recent post of his about his project the RetroProjecto I reached out to him to talk about it. The RetroProject is a retrofitted 16mm Craig film editor with a Raspberry Pi added in it to run retro games.

jdodson: What interested you to getting into hacking the Raspberry Pi?

Douglas Welcome: Honestly it was the price! I have always been tinkering with electronics and was doing a little coding, but when I first started hearing wind of this $35 computer I couldn’t help but get one and start dreaming how I could use it. With the HDMI capabilities, a media center for my home TV was the obvious first project. No more setting the laptop up half open next to the TV and plugging an HDMI cable into it for Netflix! The next project was setting a Raspberry Pi with an external hard driveup as a home server, which still isn’t entirely off the ground. thanks to moving a couple of times since then. Most recently was this retro arcade project.

jdodson: From start to finish about how long did it take you to convert the RetroProjecto into it’s final video game playing form?

Douglas Welcome: It probably took about 4-5 months, but that was putting in a few hours here and there, then letting it sit for a week because you have to order the next part. Then you get around to ordering ordering the next part, only to find a new challenge, which takes a few more days to figure out. Then you break the part you ordered and have to get another one...

jdodson: So you were out walking and saw the Craig Projecto-Editor lying in the street or out in a dumpster? Hard to imagine someone would throw something so awesome out.

Douglas Welcome: I know! Capitol Hill is a eclectic community. Young families, Senators, lobbyists, group houses full of interns and Hill staffers, you name it. You have these old houses blocks from Congress and the Supreme Court that as recent at 15 years ago sold for pennies. It was a pretty rough neighborhood. Now the neighborhood is in major gentrification mode and so folks with $$$ are buying these old homes up, gutting them and turning them into ultra-chic row homes. That was the story of the place I walked by. They had emptied out the basement planning to remodel it, and the previously owners were probably an older family that had been there for years. There were old corded drills and other tools piled up on the curb, a long with the Craig Projecto-Editor. A memorial to a man-cave I suppose…

jdodson: So you were out and found the Craig and picked it up, which was the right thing to do obviously but how did you get inspired to turn it into a full retro system?

Douglas Welcome: The enclosure was just dying to be some kind of computer or arcade. Originally I had plans to turn it into a synth (I am a musician as well) or some other project in the home the would require a “terminal” of some kind. But I was in grad school with little time, and retro arcades are a pretty well documented project, so it seemed like the path of least resistance. Plus everybody loves retro video games!

jdodson: Did you try editing some 16mm film on it before you converted it?

Douglas Welcome: I wish! I don’t have any old film so I wasn’t able to see how it would have worked.

jdodson: What are some of your favorite old games you like coming back to now?

Douglas Welcome: Funny how you said “coming back to!” Honestly, I was never much of a cutting-edge gamer and never have owned a real console. My parents were those kind that never let me own a Nintendo and so I would play for hours when over at the neighbors or something. I am a little younger, so the Nintendo 64 was the big console of my childhood. I remember going to Blockbuster and actually renting consoles for sleepovers and such.

You know though, it really is a small world. I realized this is the shower the other day (where I do all my important thinking), but it was you, Jon, who introduced me to emulators and roms when I was in middle school back 1997 or so. Suddenly I had all these classic NES games at my fingertips that I wasn’t allowed play and suddenly the internet was an AMAZING place. You also introduced me to Napster, but that is another story…

That said, back to your question. Obviously the classics, like Super Mario Bros., Punch-Out!, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Zelda. I also played a bunch of SNES games, and I loved NBA Jam (BOOM-SHAKA-LAKA). One of the stranger titles I find pretty hilarious is Spiritual Warfare. As a child of 80’s/90’s American Evangelicalism, it's not hard to see how something like this was made. You basically go around and throw “Fruits of the Spirit” at evil businessmen, gangsters and Hare Krishnas, converting them into little praying angels or something. The final boss is apparently Satan, which I guess is appropriate considering the context. Oh, and you have to answer annoying Bible quiz questions from a snarky, bow-tie wearing Sunday school teacher about lusting after women and murder. You know, kids stuff.

jdodson: I had that game and I honestly still have a special place in my heart for it. It’s one of the better Zelda clones i’ve played and I actually made it to hell many times to kill Satan. Honestly I don’t get how Doom got so much grief when you were essentially killing demons and zombies when I was doing it years earlier on the NES. But yeah, I don’t really believe much of that anymore either but it’s a fun game and I still have the original NES game cart. Last year at Portland Retro Gaming Expo I bought some original Spiritual Warfare and Bible Adventures stickers which was a really fun find.

Douglas Welcome: Stickers! That’s rad! Like I said, because I didn’t actually own a console as a kid, so it was less a nostalgic feeling about actually playing the game and rather more about a childhood where games like Spiritual Warfare were commercially viable because ya know, Sunday School, Jerry Falwell, etc.

jdodson: What are some of the better old game titles that play well with the RetroProjecto’s build aesthetic? For some reason Fallout seems to be coming to mind.

Douglas Welcome: Aww Man! I have yet to play Fallout on here but it is definitely on my list. Honestly, because of the resolution of the screen, anything better than 16 bit or so gets pretty rough to see, and because I am running all this on an older Raspberry Pi, it couldn’t handle the processing anyways.

Honestly anything close to arcade style seems appropriate. It's a cool thing to show to friends, so any game where you have to take turns works well for a social setting.

jdodson: Have you thought about any upcoming projects you’d like to work on now that this has turned out as well as it has?

Douglas Welcome: I really want to pick up that synth project I had originally intended. If you haven’t seen Critter and Guitari’s Organelle, definitely check it out. A really cool concept for musical instrument that blurs the line between hardware and software. At $500 though, I am thinking I can build something a lot more economically with a Raspberry Pi running PureData and still use all the patches being developed for the Organelle community. I just have to find a good enclosure…

http://douglaswelcome.com/